May 19, 2012

A High-Performance, Low-Memory Apache/PHP Virtual Private Server

I’ve previously written about my Multi-Server Web Hosting Environment and the how I Tuned Lighttpd For Linux to run as well as possible. But I’ve been having weird issues with that setup lately and was forced to rebuild the server entirely. While I was at it, I decided to give Apache another try, since the lighttpd hackery I needed to perform to get things like WP-SuperCache running were starting to get me down. The configuration documented here uses Ubuntu Lucid (10.04), Apache 2.2, FCGI, and PHP-CGI tuned for a 512 MB virtual private server (VPS) running on Rackspace Slicehost.

Tuning Lighttpd For Linux

As I mentioned on Friday, I’ve recently built a multi-server web hosting environment around lighttpd, MySQL, and Ubuntu Linux. Ironically, my lighttpd web server slowed to a crawl that very evening! It turns out that I had not properly tuned lighttpd to function in a Linux environment. I was surprised to find that the Ubuntu [...]

Setting Up a Multi-Server Web Hosting Environment

A multi-server setup delivers performance, reliability, and future capability.

The last few weeks have been tough on my web servers. The release of iPhone OS 3.0 tripled my site traffic overnight as folks investigate the new Exchange integration features, and traffic to IT commentary site, Gestalt IT, which I also host, has been growing rapidly. Plus, Google just refreshed PageRank again, sending even more [...]

How To Force Apache To Redirect To Canonical Hostnames, or ServerAlias Is Not Your Friend

Today I came up against a frustrating realization: Apache doesn’t have a satisfying way to redirect multiple domains to canonical hostnames! In other words, it’s fairly easy to redirect one domain’s content from “www.example.com” to just plain “example.com” or to make both hostnames work, but there’s no one-stop solution to do this with a dozen domains. I’ve hit on a method that correctly redirects alternate hostnames and will save you aggravation in the long run.

How To Make TimThumb Play Nicely With TanTan’s WordPress S3 Plugin

Just a random photo to demonstrate that TimThumb is working properly with Amazon S3

I’m loving the Woo theme for this blog, and especially love that they integrated the cool TimThumb script to automatically resize thumbnails for the main page. But everything stopped working when I added TanTan’s Wordpress-S3 plugin to store my images on Amazon’s servers. Luckily, I found a fix!